Baseball Thread

[Just Want 2 Read]

Anyone who is talking about the Pirates trading Skenes is fucking retarded, Cherington probably isn't even trusted to part ways with Keller. Dude is a fucking retard, Nutting needs to find his balls.

 

[Meat Target]

The same "let the kids play" type stuff got said about Tim Anderson and he was one of the biggest locker room cancers in baseball.

I said before that I love baseball to death, I despise how it has the most Reddit fanbase of any of the major North American sports.

I, too, love baseball to death. But I don't hate the fans as much as I hate the culture around the players, coaches, parents, and organizations.

Competitive baseball attracts some of the rudest, most arrogant, most churlish jackasses in the Western Hemisphere. Bryce Harper's demeanor is hardly an outlier. I've had the displeasure of rubbing shoulders with them over the years.

The Unwritten Rules aren't merely boomer platitudes; they exist to maintain a spirit of good sportsmanship and keep these shitheads in their place.

Sadly, baseball is also a Good Ol' Boys Club. Once you hit the high school level, making the team or getting playing time is determined less by talent or merit, and more by who the coaching staff knows (or gets the most money from), or the ones who just hang out with the actually talented players.

"Let the kids play" should be about not underestimating the walk-ons, and giving the benchwarmers a chance to prove and improve themselves. In practice, it means "continue ballwashing and enabling the obnoxious prima donnas."

 

[A.P. Hill]

The Rangers just can't get back to .500. One day they can't score runs, the next day they win 8-2 and you think "wow, they can actually score" and then the next day, when a win would take them to .500, one of the normally good pitchers shits the bed and they give up 11 runs to the lame duck A's.

 

[Mordecai "3 Finger" Brown]

The Rangers just can't get back to .500. One day they can't score runs, the next day they win 8-2 and you think "wow, they can actually score" and then the next day, when a win would take them to .500, one of the normally good pitchers shits the bed and they give up 11 runs to the lame duck A's.

The Jays were 26-28 during the finale of their May 28th away series in Arlington, when Bo Bichette with a sore back came off the bench to hit a 9th inning PH HR to win 2-0.

Since that game, the Jays are 27-11 and somehow learned to score runs again.

 

[bad luck bootsy TRUTHER]

DJ bros, it’s so fucking over.

 

[Mordecai "3 Finger" Brown]

DJ bros, it’s so fucking over.

LeMathieu's 6/90 extension deal was an albatross the second it was signed.

I recall 5 years ago thinking Cashman was using the old NHL cap tricks with guys like Ilya Kovalchuk, signing guys well passed their anticipated best before dates, simply to get frontloaded cap hits down via AAV.

I don't think anyone expected DJ to fall apart right off the bat though. He was such a terror when he first crossed over from the Rockies.

 

[Armor of God]

Ohtani hits his 32nd homer into McCovey Cove to give the Dodgers 2-1 lead early in the game.

I always hoped that he would hit one into the water one of these years and I'm glad that he's done it. It's also fascinating because Willie McCovey is actually a pretty good comparison for Ohtani as a hitter (to me personally). 500+ homers at a .270 ish average is where I think Ohtani the hitter will end up if he stays healthy for the majority of his contract.

More impressive than the homer was actually Ohtani's first at-bat of the game where he fouled off several pitches before being walked. I've criticized him for not being able to make pitchers "work" to get him out; in particular I felt that he does his damage early in at-bats or also gets out early.

I still want to see less swing and miss from the guy, but these homers really are majestic. I know that I can be insufferable at times given how much I enjoy watching this cat play, but in a clownworld where I can't have anything nice, let me at least enjoy Ohtani's career.

 

[Looseleaf Paper]

Jacob DeGrom has opted out of the Allstar Game (good idea). That leaves the Texas Rangers with no All-star players on the team
I'm a bit bummed, hopefully somebody drops and we can get a pity pick. Hoby Milner has had an ok season , and Josh Smith can play anywhere.

 

[Local Fed]

Jacob DeGrom has opted out of the Allstar Game (good idea). That leaves the Texas Rangers with no All-star players on the team
I'm a bit bummed, hopefully somebody drops and we can get a pity pick. Hoby Milner has had an ok season , and Josh Smith can play anywhere.

I don't understand how Nathan Eovaldi isn't on the American League roster. He's having a fantastic season. Casey Mize, who is also having a very good season, of the Tigers is on the team, but Eovaldi handily bests him in every category there is other than wins. It's not as if Mize is only there as the obligatory "every team has to have a representative" member considering Detroit has a trio of players who will be in the starting lineup (Javier Baez, Gleyber Torres, and Riley Greene.)

Eovaldi should be there over Bryan Woo (he's having a fantastic season, no doubt) too in my opinion; the Mariners have Cal Raleigh in the starting lineup and their closer Andres Munoz is deservedly on the team so he's not a "everyone gets a ribbon" pick either.

Meanwhile, Shane Smith of the White Sox is on the team since they had to have someone there. No offense to him, but he's pitched to #5 starter numbers on the year and hasn't given up fewer than 5 earned runs in a start in just over a month.

Adrian Houser's only made 9 starts, but at least I could rationalize him as being Chicago's representative since he's quietly been one of the best starters in the Majors after going over from his minors deal with Texas.

 

[Tommy John Surgery]

Let's check in with Paul Skenes and the godforsaken land of the Yinzers.
He has 16 starts allowing 2 earned runs or less with a record of 4-5.

Ah, 5 losses and 7 no-decisions. It's almost like Jacob DeGrom never left the NL...

 

[Looseleaf Paper]

I don't understand how Nathan Eovaldi isn't on the American League roster. He's having a fantastic season. Casey Mize, who is also having a very good season, of the Tigers is on the team, but Eovaldi handily bests him in every category there is other than wins. It's not as if Mize is only there as the obligatory "every team has to have a representative" member considering Detroit has a trio of players who will be in the starting lineup (Javier Baez, Gleyber Torres, and Riley Greene.)

Eovaldi should be there over Bryan Woo (he's having a fantastic season, no doubt) too in my opinion; the Mariners have Cal Raleigh in the starting lineup and their closer Andres Munoz is deservedly on the team so he's not a "everyone gets a ribbon" pick either.

Meanwhile, Shane Smith of the White Sox is on the team since they had to have someone there. No offense to him, but he's pitched to #5 starter numbers on the year and hasn't given up fewer than 5 earned runs in a start in just over a month.

Adrian Houser's only made 9 starts, but at least I could rationalize him as being Chicago's representative since he's quietly been one of the best starters in the Majors after going over from his minors deal with Texas.

I agree, but even if Eovaldi was selected he probably would opt out anyway, which I also think is a good idea, since he just got off a month long injury. They probably know he wouldn't play anyway and aren't selecting him after the drop outs because of that, and his missed time is what led him to not get selected out right in the "first round" so to speak.

Oh well, nobody on the team really deserves a spot except DeGrom, Eovaldi, or Mahle (injured) so I can't be too sad lol.

 

[Armor of God]

Jacob DeGrom has opted out of the Allstar Game (good idea). That leaves the Texas Rangers with no All-star players on the team
I'm a bit bummed, hopefully somebody drops and we can get a pity pick. Hoby Milner has had an ok season , and Josh Smith can play anywhere.

Few things would make me happier than for DeGrom to be healthy for the rest of his career and put in as many "counting stats" as possible so that the faggots who vote on the Hall of Fame cannot reasonably keep him out.

There was a stretch there where he was as dominant as any pitcher who has ever played this game. The Hall of Fame needs Jacob DeGrom.

 

[Tommy John Surgery]

Milwaukee's rookie hurler Misiorowski just got named as an All-Star...with 5 starts under his belt. Don't get me wrong, 97 mph on his changeup is some real hurling but is that all the Brewers have?

 

[Local Fed]

is that all the Brewers have?

It's another one that makes no sense. They already have two pitchers on the team in starter Freddy Peralta and closer Trevor Megill so it's not like they're lacking the mandatory representation.

 

[Mordecai "3 Finger" Brown]

Milwaukee's rookie hurler Misiorowski just got named as an All-Star...with 5 starts under his belt. Don't get me wrong, 97 mph on his changeup is some real hurling but is that all the Brewers have?

It's another one that makes no sense. They already have two pitchers on the team in starter Freddy Peralta and closer Trevor Megill so it's not like they're lacking the mandatory representation.

I listened to a rambling, old-man-yells-at-cloud discussion with former Rangers/Mets/Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine on David Samson's podcast (former Jeffrey Loria era Marlins exec).

A lot of the talk was the stress & banality of Valentine managing the NL for the 2001? ASG after leading the Mets to the WS the year before.

Valentine argued that the ASG should be based on career rizz instead of current year first half performance because the "fans deserve to see the stars" (I guess he's arguing for a pretty static year-to-year Legends type model, which is the exact opposite of the Misiorwoski pick).

He also talked about
- losing sleep for weeks on deciding roster picks for his NL side (Didn't think ASG managers had much say. Maybe they did in 2001).
- said he picked Curt Schilling to be the ASG SP in Seattle and Randy Johnson pouted and "Don't come back to me asking to play". Then Schilling pulled up lame in his bullpen (possibly on purpose), so Valentine had to beg the Big Unit to start instead, who told him he'd only go "2 innings not 3"
- accused Joe Torre in the AL of being a spineless pussy filling the roster with all his Yankee guys because he was too scared to have them mad at him by picking others
- Valentine talked about painstakingly pouring over advanced analytics for 2001 to select the most deserving candidates for his NL side
- picked some other 3B for the NL based on the SABR numbers, but later regretted it and wished he'd just chosen Robin Ventura from the Mets as nepotism
- said he specifically had a plan to get Barry Bonds the AS MVP by keeping him in the game with 4 ABs. Said he talked to Bonds, who agreed. Then halfway through one of his coaches told him they'd have to PH for Bonds because Barry left the stadium early without telling Valentine to catch his charter flight home
- said Tommy Lasorda begged Valentine to play 3rd base coach for crowd facetime. Then Vlad Guerrero Sr almost killed a feeble Lasorda with a foulball, who Valentine didn't think Vlad was concerned enough.

 

[OJ Simpson]

Tommy John Surgery said:

Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine

Thanks for dredging up something that had been successfully memory holed.

 

[Armor of God]

Reflections on Barry Bonds

I'd been meaning to do a piece on Bonds for while and was reminded of it due to all of the recent tributes and adulation that he's been getting from the Giants. I also remember hearing that they were going to put up a statue for the guy. I wanted to do a little bit of a deep dive/reflection on different aspects of Bonds the player and Bonds the person.

The player

A common cope by Bonds apologists is the assertion that you could split his career into 2 halves and you would get 2 Hall of Famers. This is absolutely asinine, as the 2nd half of his career was obviously heavily aided by PED abuse.

I also reject the notion that his steroid abuse was "balanced out" by the fact that many pitchers were juicing as well. I also think that pitchers benefit from steroids more by being able to recover quicker from injuries and in-between starts. In contrast, a hitter is going to benefit in all kinds of ways from these steroids.

To give you an idea of how roided up to the fucking gills Barry was, his hat size grew 2 sizes, his jersey went from Size 42 to Size 52 and his shoe size went from 10.5 to 13. He gained 55 lbs. from his time in Pittsburgh. I have never, ever heard of some shit like this.

I would contend that while Bonds was already a stupendous player before steroids, the magnitude of his use (again, the head size increase, etc.) as well as perhaps the type of steroids that he was doing artificially put him in a completely different stratosphere. We have to essentially throw out his steroid year if we're doing a fair appraisal of the guy vs. all of the other great players who have played this game.

I've done quite a bit of number crunching and if you take the 11 year period between 1989 and 1999 (includes a healthy portion of his Giants career and also before the steroids started to kick in), he was basically a 35 homer / 35 steals per year guy slashing 0.296/0.425/0.587 with a OPS of 1.012 and a OPS+ of 174. He also generated an average of 8 WAR / year during this stretch and also won his 8 Golden Gloves.

In his prime, he was a 4 tool player and basically a much better version of Juan Soto (more power, much better fielder, much better baserunner although Soto has been more clutch in the playoffs).

Now if you add in his first 3 years before the 11 year prime above and also account for steady decline in his last 8 years (throwing out his steroid-influenced stats and replacing them with a more "natural" curve) post the prime, then I think he ends up with 600 + homers and a career WAR of around 110 or so. Again, these would be first ballot Hall of Fame numbers on their own so even adjusting for steroids there is no question that he had a Hall-worthy career.

One last point, Bonds was objectively a horrible player in the playoffs (other than 1 of the steroid years) and very likely caused the Pirates to miss out on going to the World Series with his repeated slumps and fuckups in the field (see below).

The person

I had always heard that that Bonds was known as an asshole off the field, but holy shit was I not prepared for how abjectly terrible a nigger he was and continues to be.

In college at Arizona, he once ran off the field in the middle of the game and caused a 10 minute delay because he had to go take a shit.

When he and his team-mates missed curfews, they were all expected to do running drills as punishment. Upon hearing this, Bonds told the team captain "Fuck you, I'm not doing shit". When Jim Brock, the Manager, heard about this he asked the team to vote on whether or not they wanted Bonds on the team.

If it wasn't for 2 idiots voting against there would have been a unanimous vote to kick him off the team. Brock didn't have the balls to do it (as he obviously should have done with such a majority being for it). Instead, Brock lowered his penalty to just a 10 mile run. Upon hearing this, Bobby Bonds apparently drove his truck onto the fucking diamond, parked it in front of the dugout and confronted Brock (mind you, this was during a closed practice). The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Early on in his Pirates career, even though he was playing exceptionally well, his team-mates absolutely hated him. A great example is as follows: Bonds got into a heated confrontation with Andy Van Slyke which resulted in a scuffle...normally you would expect team-mates to quickly break up the fight right?

Well...Van Slyke was pulled off of Bonds, but then 5-6 of his team-mates proceed to pummel the motherfucking shit out of Bonds. I have never, in my decades and decades of following sports heard of such a thing happening in a locker room.

He once shoved a pizza into a team-mate's face during a heated argument and during contract arbitration, Bonds tried to jump across the table and physically fight the Pirates' GM.

The infamous confrontation with Jim Leyland is absolutely hilarious in retrospect but really shows you who Bonds is.

Against the Braves that one year, it was Game 7 and the 9th inning. The Pirates were up 2 runs and when Van Slyke told Barry to play shallow, Bonds gave him the finger and refused. The result? A hit to Barry which scored the winning run because Bond's weak throw wasn't in time to get the runner at home plate.

In SF, he and Jeff Kent fought at least a half dozen times.

A longtime photographer for the Pirates, Pete Diana, had over the years given Barry tons of photos for free. There was an accident at the Pirates stadium where 2 members of the staff tragically died. Diana started a very nice effort to try and raise some money for the families: whenever opposing players would come to Pittsburgh, he would ask them to sign memorabilia which would then be auctioned off and the proceeds would be given to the families.

Pretty much every star player you can think of from that era signed a bunch of stuff. So then, the Giants come to town and Diana (who obviously knew Barry well) asked him to sign some stuff. Barry's response? "Fuck you, fuck them, I'm not signing shit".

Pete Diana then told Jeff Pearlman when interviewed, "I hope Barry Bonds dies". Jesus Christ.

The Giants enabled a lot of Bonds' nigger behavior. He had an entire wall of the locker room to himself, including a leather recliner and a flat screen TV in front of his chair. While everyone else had to use the team publicist, Bonds had his own 2 publicists. He had his own massage therapist and even his own photographer.

This is only a sampling of all the insane confrontations that he had with players and press. If we include his horrific behavior with the press then I'd have to make about 10 more posts of this length. He was objectively cruel and seemed almost sadistic in how he treated pretty much any member of the press. Jesus I haven't even gotten into how he used to beat his wife to a pulp (even when she was 8 months pregnant).

I'm also not going to go into the debacle that was his stint as the Marlins' hitting coach, but it just goes to show that even so many years after retiring, he was still the same old asshole. You guys can look it up, but it's all the typical uppity nigger shit: a necessity to get paid the most and getting unheard of perks, not doing shit to help players improve, clashing with other coaches and management...

Final thoughts

For so many years, all I had known was that Bonds had a terrible relationship with the press...after I started compiling all of the stories I was just shocked at how many of his team-mates hated him. I also had no idea about how cruel he was to basically everyone. If ever there has been a player in any sports league who was a detriment to his team from a leadership and example setting perspective, it was absolutely Bonds.

His stats make for a clear Hall of Fame case, however given how much of a negative influence he was, I really can't blame anyone for Bonds being left off of ballots (and this is even if he never took steroids). He's quite possibly the worst person who has ever played a sport professionally.

As I was writing this, I kept thinking about how the richest nigger neighborhoods have more crime than the most impoverished white towns in places like rural Appalachia or even your random trailer park which is half meth labs.

Whether it's some gang-banging porch monkey on a school bus beating up other kids, some hoodrat bitch fighting another heifer on a cruise or the son of a famous ball player who grew up in affluence and received every aspect of a proper upbringing, one noble truth remains: a nigger will always be a nigger.

They're the worst scum on the face of the planet and can only defile and destroy anything that they come in touch with.

In the film "48 hours", Nick Nolte's character remarks to Eddie Murphy's that "Class isn't something you buy. Look at you, you've got on a 500-dollar suit and you're still a low-life."

Sums up the career and life of Bonds rather nicely I'd say.

 

[Mordecai "3 Finger" Brown]

Sums up the career and life of Bonds rather nicely I'd say.

My lasting memory of Barry Bonds was the collusion to keep him out of baseball and force him to retire in 2008.

Now maybe his personality and burning too many bridges finally caught up with him.

I'd also forgotten that he was 43 at the time!!!

But this wasn't like a David Ortiz, career year victory lap, going out on his own terms.

No one would sign the man after he just had an OPS above 1.000, 132 walks and was 69% better than league average offensively.

I'm kind of surprised that he was only worth 3.4 bWAR in his final year, but that's still valuable and he wasn't taking the field.

It's another example of leaguewide and commissioner-initiated collusion like Trevor Bauer to keep a player out of the game.

 

[Franz Joseph]

My lasting memory of Barry Bonds was the collusion to keep him out of baseball and force him to retire in 2008.

Now maybe his personality and burning too many bridges finally caught up with him.

I'd also forgotten that he was 43 at the time!!!

But this wasn't like a David Ortiz, career year victory lap, going out on his own terms.

No one would sign the man after he just had an OPS above 1.000, 132 walks and was 69% better than league average offensively.

I'm kind of surprised that he was only worth 3.4 bWAR in his final year, but that's still valuable and he wasn't taking the field.

It's another example of leaguewide and commissioner-initiated collusion like Trevor Bauer to keep a player out of the game.

Since we are sharing "Bonds is a massive piece of shit" stories I got one. I remember in 2004 Bonds did an interview for the Boston Globe in which he went off on the city of Boston calling it a racist shithole and how he would never play for them even if they were the only team to offer him a deal due to city's history with racism, of course he never gives examples of him getting racial slurs thrown his way when the Giants played at Fenway for interleague, he's only going off of what other black players told him (His father being one of them). This lead to Pedro Martinez calling Bonds out on his bullshit saying he never experienced any racism while playing for Boston. Of course, this didn't stop some in the soy addled press to run with Barry's claims, you got your typical Reddit tier articles like "Bostons dark history with racism" and shit like that. I found it extremely funny that some in the press went to bat for Bonds despite Bonds having a history of treating the press like utter shit. I guess they are willing to look the other way to Barry's antics cause we can't have heckin racism guys!

 

[OJ Simpson]

Since we are sharing "Bonds is a massive piece of shit" stories I got one. I remember in 2004 Bonds did an interview for the Boston Globe in which he went off on the city of Boston calling it a racist shithole and how he would never play for them even if they were the only team to offer him a deal due to city's history with racism, of course he never gives examples of him getting racial slurs thrown his way when the Giants played at Fenway for interleague, he's only going off of what other black players told him (His father being on of them). This lead to Pedro Martinez calling Bonds out on his bullshit saying he never experienced any racism while playing for Boston. Of course, this didn't stop some in the soy addled press to run with Barry's claims, you got your typical Reddit tier articles like "Bostons dark history with racism" and shit like that. I found it extremely funny that some in the press went to bat for Bonds despite Bonds having a history of treating the press like utter shit. I guess they are willing to look the other way to Barry's antics cause we can't have heckin racism guys!

As an aside, I've been sick of the Boston is uniquely racist horseshit since I first started seeing it when posting on other forums that had a sports section starting in the late 00's/early 2010's. It's always been bullshit and a myth. Boston has never been any more or less "racist" than any other city throughout America over the course of history. Not liking niggers at points in history was just common place, and it's retarded to act like a progressive bug hive like Boston has this dark and sordid history with racism that no other city has. Progressivism is its own form of racism, but not the sort of racism the people moaning about Boston claim or want it to be. It's no different than modern negros/white guilt mayo people crying about how some blacks were whipped and made to work in fields 300 years ago so there's some sort of imagined residual pain that we must continue to treat like a dead horse. Bill Russell was racially abused when Long Tall Sally was a brand new bitchin' hit on the pop charts so we have to continue to pretend Boston is virulently racist 40-60 years later. Tbh these claims always just smacked of jealousy of Boston's unprecedented success in sports.